Debris
«chaque notaire porte en soi les débris d’un poète.»Archive for history
Greensboro Goddam
In the crush of a busy week, I nearly overlooked the fact that Tuesday marked the 30th anniversary of the Greensboro Massacre, in which neo-Nazis and KKK members murdered five anti-racist and labor activists and wounded another eleven. As far as I can tell, the anniversary passed without any official public commemoration in Greensboro. I can understand that residents might be reluctant to recall that dark moment in our city’s history. A Truth & Reconciliation Commission held public hearings and issued a detailed report just a few years ago. But my sense, as a newcomer to the city, is that sentiment remains divided, both about the massacre itself and about the commission.
However painful, it is essential that we remember.
Natural selection: Yes, we can!
Mike Rosulek, computer science graduate student at the University of Illinois, has designed a set of images, based on the ubiquitous Shepard Fairey Obama image, to commemorate the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth. This is my personal favorite, in part because of the (presumably unintended, though Rosulek sounds like a Czech name, so perhaps it was deliberate) play on Jaroslav Hašek’s Party of Moderate and Peaceful Progress Within the Limits of the Law:
Rosulek is selling t-shirts with the images to raise money for the National Center for Science Education, a very worthy cause.
(Thanks to Concurring Opinions for the tip.)
“Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.”
My trip to eastern North Carolina this weekend wasn’t all fun and games and pirates. I came out here to meet with a group of truckers who are organizing a union after growing fed up with having their livlihoods left to the whim of the bosses. This is a remarkable group in many ways. In a region where the Klan not too long ago paraded openly (we’re only a short drive from where a sign along Highway 301 once proclaimed “The Klan welcomes you to Smithfield. Help fight communism and integration.”), and where Confederate flags are still a common sight, this is a group of African-American and White workers joining together in solidarity. And in a state with the lowest rate of union membership in the U.S., they are doing so under the banner of an explicitly radical and militant union: the Industrial Workers of the World. The meeting — in what my son described as a “rickety old” community center — was almost like taking a step back in time; yet, for these workers, the effort represents a great leap forward. If there really is to be a revival of unions in this country, it won’t come from the top down, nor through legislative grants. It will come from the workers themselves, asserting their own collective interests and collective power.
It was in support of another such group of workers that Dr. King was in Memphis in April 1968. That’s why these North Carolina truckers chose this weekend to formally launch their union. I can think of no better way that I might have honored Dr. King’s legacy than by coming here to meet with these workers and support their effort.
Tomorrow, Dr. King’s famous dream will come one step closer to fruition, as the United States witnesses the inauguration of our first African-American President. I have plenty of reservations about Barack Obama, and little hope that his Presidency really signals a fundamental change in this nation’s politics or policy in a radical-democratic direction. Yet, his inauguration does undeniably represent an important and joyful moment. There will be plenty of time for critique and cyncism after tomorrow. For now, I’m happy to join in celebration.
McElree’s Wine of Cardui
Washington, North Carolina
“Wine of Cardui” was a patent medicine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, marketed as a cure for “female diseases”. In 1916, the Chattanooga Medicine Company, which made Wine of Cardui, won a libel suit against the American Medical Association, which had published an article in its Journal calling the product “a worthless fraud”. While the jury found for the plaintiff, they evidently didn’t think much of the product; instead of the $200,000 in damages requested, the jury awarded one penny.
Now ain’t the time for tears
46 years after he beat to death Hattie Carroll — a crime for which he received a mere 6-month sentence — William Zantzinger has finally died.
Clearing the Ayers
Bill Ayers (a guy from my former neighborhood, in whose home I once attended a political meeting) puts the Weather Underground’s activities in perspective:
I think we were off the tracks, definitely. And I think we were jacking ourselves to do something that was unthinkable and that none of us could ever imagine ourselves getting into. We were driven, I think, by a combination of hope and despair. And in one chapter, I imagine two groups of Americans. One slightly off the tracks and despairing of how to end this war and penetrating the Pentagon and putting a small charge in a bathroom that disables an Air Force computer. An act of extreme vandalism, but hard to call, in my view, terrorism.
Meanwhile, another group of Americans — also despairing, also off the tracks — walks into a Vietnamese village and kills everyone there. Children, women, old men. They kill every living thing, even livestock, and burn the place to the ground.
And the question is, What is terrorism? And what is violence?
Indeed.
People who live in glass igloos shouldn’t throw stones
You’d think that Sarah Palin — who has not only palled around with anti-American secessionists but actually borne children with one — would kind of want to avoid the whole “guilt by association” thing.
In the interest of full disclosure, I suppose I ought to confess that, back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I lived in the same Chicago neighborhood as Bill Ayers. During that time, I was active in a political organization of which he was also a member, attended at least one political meeting at which he was also present, and worked for a foundation that awarded him a grant for his work on public education. Of course, like Barack Obama, I was about 8 years old when the Weather Underground engaged in their bombings. And, like Barack Obama, I’ve expressed my dim view of their actions. Still, I guess it’s just as well that I have no aspiration to run for office.
